First Day at School

Related poetry:

1. The School In August The cloakroom pegs are empty now, And locked the classroom door, The hollow desks are lined with dust, And slow across the floor A sunbeam creeps between the chairs Till the sun shines no more. Who did their hair before this glass? Who scratched ‘Elaine loves Jill’ One drowsy summer sewing-class With scissors on the […]...
2. The Flower-School When storm-clouds rumble in the sky and June showers come down. The moist east wind comes marching over the heath to blow its Bagpipes among the bamboos. Then crowds of flowers come out of a sudden, from nobody knows Where, and dance upon the grass in wild glee. Mother, I really think the flowers go […]...
3. The New School (For My Mother) The halls that were loud with the merry tread of Young and careless feet Are still with a stillness that is too drear to seem like holiday, And never a gust of laughter breaks the calm of the dreaming street Or rises to shake the ivied walls and frighten the doves away. […]...
4. Whats The Use Of A Title? They dont make it The beautiful die in flame – Sucide pills, rat poison, rope what – Ever… They rip their arms off, Throw themselves out of windows, They pull their eyes out of the sockets, Reject love Reject hate Reject, reject. They do’nt make it The beautiful can’t endure, They are butterflies They are […]...
5. September, The First Day Of School I My child and I hold hands on the way to school, And when I leave him at the first-grade door He cries a little but is brave; he does Let go. My selfish tears remind me how I cried before that door a life ago. I may have had a hard time letting go. […]...
6. Picnic Boat SUNDAY night and the park policemen tell each other it Is dark as a stack of black cats on Lake Michigan. A big picnic boat comes home to Chicago from the peach Farms of Saugatuck. Hundreds of electric bulbs break the night’s darkness, a Flock of red and yellow birds with wings at a standstill. […]...
7. Keepsake Mill Over the borders, a sin without pardon, Breaking the branches and crawling below, Out through the breach in the wall of the garden, Down by the banks of the river we go. Here is a mill with the humming of thunder, Here is the weir with the wonder of foam, Here is the sluice with […]...
8. Among School Children I I walk through the long schoolroom questioning; A kind old nun in a white hood replies; The children learn to cipher and to sing, To study reading-books and histories, To cut and sew, be neat in everything In the best modern way – the children’s eyes In momentary wonder stare upon A sixty-year-old smiling […]...
9. Mind Games I am a waterfall in the desert. A rain from a cloudless sky. A well known but unborn child. An insistence experience That you never had. I play mind games with your brain. When you strike the keys and remember the sea I come as indefinable memory. When you look at your watch And the […]...
10. Le Gout du Néant Morne esprit, autrefois amoureux de la lutte, L’Espoir, dont l’éperon attisait ton ardeur, Ne veut plus t’enfourcher! Couche-toi sans pudeur, Vieux cheval dont le pied à chaque obstacle bute. Résigne-toi, mon coeur; dors ton sommeil de brute. Esprit vaincu, fourbu! Pour toi, vieux maraudeur, L’amour n’a plus de gout, non plus que la dispute; Adieu […]...
11. Cotton Song Come, brother, come. Lets lift it; Come now, hewit! roll away! Shackles fall upon the Judgment Day But lets not wait for it. God’s body’s got a soul, Bodies like to roll the soul, Cant blame God if we dont roll, Come, brother, roll, roll! Cotton bales are the fleecy way, Weary sinner’s bare feet […]...
12. Felix Schmidt It was only a little house of two rooms Almost like a child’s play-house With scarce five acres of ground around it; And I had so many children to feed And school and clothe, and a wife who was sick From bearing children. One day lawyer Whitney came along And proved to me that Christian […]...
13. A School Song “Let us now praise famous men” Men of little showing For their work continueth, And their work continueth, Broad and deep continues, Greater then their knowing! Western wind and open surge Took us from our mothers Flung us on a naked shore (Twelve bleak houses by the shore. Seven summers by the shore! ) ‘Mid […]...
14. The Old Bark School It was built of bark and poles, and the floor was full of holes Where each leak in rainy weather made a pool; And the walls were mostly cracks lined with calico and sacks – There was little need for windows in the school. Then we rode to school and back by the rugged gully-track, […]...
15. Orphan School Full fifty merry maids I heard One summer morn a-singing; And each was like a joyous bird With spring-clear not a-ringing. It was an old-time soldier song That held their happy voices: Oh how it’s good to swing along When youth rejoices! Then lo! I dreamed long years had gone, They passed again ungladly. Their […]...
16. The Rest The rest of us watch from beyond the fence As the woman moves with her jagged stride Into her pain as if into a slow race. We see her body in motion But hear no sounds, or we hear Sounds but no language; or we know It is not a language we know Yet. We […]...
17. The School Of Metaphysics Executioner happy to explain How his wristwatch works As he shadows me on the street. I call him that because he is grim and officious And wears black. The clock on the church tower Had stopped at five to eleven. The morning newspapers had no date. The gray building on the corner Could’ve been a […]...
18. The Latest School See the flying French depart Like the bees of Bonaparte, Swarming up with a most venomous vitality. Over Baden and Bavaria, And Brighton and Bulgaria, Thus violating Belgian neutrality. And the injured Prussian may Not unreasonably say “Why, it cannot be so small a nationality Since Brixton and Batavia, Bolivia and Belgravia, Are bursting with […]...
19. Going Back to School The boat ploughed on. Now Alcatraz was past And all the grey waves flamed to red again At the dead sun’s last glimmer. Far and vast The Sausalito lights burned suddenly In little dots and clumps, as if a pen Had scrawled vague lines of gold across the hills; The sky was like a cup […]...
20. Kitchener's School 1898 Being a translation of the song that was made by a Mohammedanschoolmaster of Bengal Infantry (some time on service at Suakim)when he heard that Kitchener was taking money from the English tobuild a Madrissa for Hubshees or a college for the Sudanese. Oh Hubshee, carry your shoes in your hand and bow your head […]...
21. The School of Night What did I study in your School of Night? When your mouth’s first unfathomable yes Opened your body to be my book, I read My answers there and learned the spell aright, Yet, though I searched and searched, could never guess What spirits it raised nor where their questions led. Those others, familiar tenants of […]...
22. THE SINGING SCHOOL The Poetry School, The Poetry Book Society, The Poetry Business: So much poetry about you’d think I’d want to shout, “Hurray, hurray, Every day’s Poetry Day!” but I don’t and you don’t either- You know its flim-flam on the ether, grants for Jack-the-lads Of both sexes, poets who’ve never been seen in a little magazine […]...
23. SCHOOL SMELL Composed of chalk dust, Pencil shavings and The sharp odour Of stale urine; It meets me now and then Creeping down a creosoted corridor Or waiting to be banged With the dust from piles of books On top of a cupboard. The double desks heeled with iron Having long been replaced; The steel-nibbed pens and […]...
24. An Old Man's Thought of School AN old man’s thought of School; An old man, gathering youthful memories and blooms, that youth itself cannot. Now only do I know you! O fair auroral skies! O morning dew upon the grass! And these I see-these sparkling eyes, These stores of mystic meaning-these young lives, Building, equipping, like a fleet of ships-immortal ships! […]...
25. The School Boy I love to rise in a summer morn, When the birds sing on every tree; The distant huntsman winds his horn, And the sky-lark sings with me. O! what sweet company. But to go to school in a summer morn, O! it drives all joy away; Under a cruel eye outworn. The little ones spend […]...
26. After School tell me one good thing You did to yourself today And tell me another That you did to others Let us check our lives With these questions, daugther For as many tomorrows We borrow (02 December, 2005)...
27. Art school each sunset is unique So others tell us Fools – with flowers Of envy pushing Through their teeth I think differently A feeble skill that Can’t repeat itself I’ll have the sun in For a spell to make A proper artist of him By time i finish with This yellow fickle lout His sunset will […]...
28. WYTHER PARK SCHOOL LEEDS FIVE I stood there in front of forty-five faces The first day of term, not especially fancying “Exercises in Mechanical Arithmetic” and so instead I read a poem from Kirkup in Japan, about Nijinsky, Hand-written on a fan of rice-paper. Thirty years later, taking a Sri Lankan girl In search of her first job around London […]...
29. A Letter From the Trenches to a School Friend I have not brought my Odyssey With me here across the sea; But you’ll remember, when I say How, when they went down Sparta way, To sandy Sparta, long ere dawn Horses were harnessed, rations drawn, Equipment polished sparkling bright, And breakfasts swallowed (as the white Of eastern heavens turned to gold) – The dogs […]...
30. The Correspondence School Instructor Says Goodbye To His Poetry Students Goodbye, lady in Bangor, who sent me Snapshots of yourself, after definitely hinting You were beautiful; goodbye, Miami Beach urologist, who enclosed plain Brown envelopes for the return of your very Clinical Sonnet; goodbye, manufacturer Of brassieres on the Coast, whose eclogues Give the fullest treatment in literature yet To the sagging-breast motif; goodbye, you […]...
31. Advice to a young sylv-i-an dragon on going to school when you step out of the wood and go first time to school You have to be so specially careful if you’re really a dragon To put the most innocent expression on your face you can find And not flip your flappers (unless the others don’t mind) You must be very strict with yourself – […]...
32. As the snow fell the children played games Getting from here To where the truth was Without touching a flake Needless to say The only ones who got there Were liars But while the honest ones Shrank back from The touch of snow The liars Were where the truth was...
33. The Poor Old Cannon Upbroke the sun In red-gold foam; Thus spoke the gun At the Soldier’s Home: “Whenever I hear Blue thunder speak My voice sounds clear But little and weak. “And when the proud Young cockerels crow My voice sounds loud, But gentle and low. “When the mocking-bird Prolongs his note I cannot be heard Though I […]...
34. To Be Blind Is it sounds converging, Sounds nearing, Infringement, impingement, Impact, contact With surfaces of the sounds Or surfaces without the sounds: Diagrams, skeletal, strange? Is it winds curling round invisible corners? Polyphony of perfumes? Antennae discovering an axis, erecting the architecture of a world? Is it orchestration of the finger-tips, graph of a fugue: Scaffold for […]...
35. Sonnet XXII: With Fools and Children To Folly With fools and children, good discretion bears; Then, honest people, bear with Love and me, Nor older yet, nor wiser made by years, Amongst the rest of fools and children be; Love, still a baby, plays with gauds and toys, And, like a wanton, sports with every feather, And idiots still are running […]...
36. M. Degas Teaches Art & Science At Durfee Intermediate School Detroit, 1942 He made a line on the blackboard, One bold stroke from right to left Diagonally downward and stood back To ask, looking as always at no one In particular, “What have I done?” From the back of the room Freddie Shouted, “You’ve broken a piece Of chalk.” M. Degas did not smile. “What have I […]...
37. MY FATHER I had a father once, the records say. He has gone away down the long avenue Of death, on the hand-held minor no mist Of his breath, his firm signature no more. No more holding down his hat in the wind, Running to catch the last post, he has gone Beyond the wind-shaped stones on […]...
38. Ye Flags of Picadilly Ye flags of Piccadilly, Where I posted up and down, And wished myself so often Well away from you and town Are the people walking quietly And steady on their feet, Cabs and omnibuses plying Just as usual in the street? Do the houses look as upright As of old they used to be, And […]...
39. Lois Spears Here lies the body of Lois Spears, Born Lois Fluke, daughter of Willard Fluke, Wife of Cyrus Spears, Mother of Myrtle and Virgil Spears, Children with clear eyes and sound limbs (I was born blind) I was the happiest of women As wife, mother and housekeeper, Caring for my loved ones, And making my home […]...
40. Villa Pauline But, ah! before he came You were only a name: Four little rooms and a cupboard Without a bone, And I was alone! Now with your windows wide Everything from outside Of sun and flower and loveliness Comes in to hide, To play, to laugh on the stairs, To catch unawares Our childish happiness, And […]...